True or false: the 'kooky' North Korea stories they couldn't make up – but did

North Koreans live in an internet-free vacuum but western bloggers, intelligence agencies and 24-hour news are making up for it, says Anna Broinowski, whose book The Director is the Commander dispels some of the crazier rumours

A caricature of a crying North Korean leader Kim Jong-un at the Unification Expo in Seoul, South Korea.
Photograph: Lee Jin-man/AP

If any country proves sensationalism beats truth in the social media economy, it’s North Korea. Sealed off from the outside world since 1953, the country’s 24.9 million people exist in an internet-free vacuum, which western bloggers, intelligence agencies and the 24-hour news cycle have been quick to fill.

Facts are notoriously difficult to verify. Credible accounts, such as the 2014 UN report on human rights abuses inside North Korean prisons, vie for eyeballs against the sensationalist claims of defectors, satirists, politically aligned “experts” and propaganda emanating from North Korea’s own news agency, KCNA.

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The habits of former leader Kim Jong-il fuelled a rumour industry worth billions of clicks. A rapacious gourmand with insteps and Eraserhead hair, Dear Leader was both pop icon and ruthless dictator: as known for his love of Cognac and squadron of Joy Division babes as he was for the cunning nuclear brinksmanship with which he dissuaded the Bush administration from dispatching him the same way it had dispatched his “failed-state” colleague, Saddam Hussein.

Now, with Kim’s son Kim Jong-un in charge, the rumour business is booming. In the past three years, we’ve learned that Kim 2.0 executed a Pyongyang traffic lady for sneezing (false); was voted 2012’s “sexiest man alive” (false); poisoned his aunt Kim Kyong-hui (false); assassinated his pop-singer girlfriend Hyon Song-wol for making porn (false); and oversaw the Sony Pictures hack in retaliation for the Kim Jong-un assassination spoof, The Interview (debatable).

When he disappeared for a month in 2014, there was speculation he had been ousted by a coup (false); killed by his generals (false); contracted gout (who knows?); or broken his ankle after growing fat from eating cheese (he does appear to have gained weight).

The malleability of digital media, and the speed with which consumers can embed and reframe North Korean content before passing it on, means even truthful accounts of Kim Jong-un’s ruthless moves to shore up his inherited power are frequently embellished. When Kim executed his uncle, Jang Song-thaek, in late 2013 for insubordination, mainstream news feeds reported Jang and five aides had been stripped naked and fed to 120 starving dogs. The story went viral, before it was traced back to a Chinese satirist’s blog on Tencent Weibo.

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Chad O’Carroll, NK News

Only this month, South Korea’s national intelligence agency reported Kim had publicly obliterated another insider, general Hyon Yong-chol, with an anti-aircraft gun. The story was widely circulated before the agency adjusted its claim: Hyon had been “purged” for “dozing off” at official events, but might still be alive.

“Critical thinking just goes out the window on North Korea,” observed Chad O’Carroll, founder of the NK News website. David Straub of Stanford University identifies “an exponential increase” in the number of people circulating anything “even remotely plausible about North Korea” – and in established media passing it on. And with consumers happy to buy entertainment as news, “kooky North Korea” stories do a roaring trade.

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KCNA’s 2012 announcement that archaeologists had discovered a unicorn lair in Pyongyang was gleefully circulated by western feeds, complete with a photoshopped horse. In 2014, the ABC on-sold Radio Free Asia’s claim that Kim Jong-un’s haircut is compulsory for Pyongyang university students; a year later, the blogosphere exploded with a recycled BBC report that long hair is banned in North Korea because it “saps brain energy”. The Toronto Sun’s craziest rumours about North Korea post alleges that North Korean Olympians who fail to win a medal are sent to the gulags, and Pyongyang officials supported Scottish independence “for the Scotch alone”.

Stories that discredit these rumours are rarely given the same fanfare or weight. The revelation that the YouTube documentary about the Pyongyang traffic lady is fake is buried in the comments page; Kim Jong-un’s pop-singer girlfriend’s appearance on KCNA a year after reports of her grisly murder failed to reach the same million consumers who believed her dead; North Korean gulag survivor Shin Dong-hyuk’s recent admission that parts of his bestselling memoir are false did little to dampen belief in its credibility; and in May, Seoul’s Daily NK ran a discreet post contradicting CNN’s widely publicised story about Kim Jong-un’s poisoned aunt, stating Kyong-hui is alive in Pyongyang.

The truth about North Korea is also a casualty when politics come into play. On 30 December 2014, when independent cyber analysts announced that disgruntled employees, not Kim Jong-un, were behind the Sony hack, the FBI had already found North Korea guilty. Senator John McCain labeled the hack an “act of war”; Sony releasedThe Interviewwith President Obama’s blessing; North Korea’s limited internet capabilities were mysteriously “blacked out” in an unattributed strike; and, by 2 January 2015, the US had imposed new sanctions on North Korea and was considering reinstating it as a “state sponsor of terrorism”.

Dead or alive: Kim Jong-un holding a baby with defence minister Hyon Yong-chol circled in the background, who has been reported executed. Photograph: YONHAP/AAP

Why does all this matter? Because if you have been to North Korea and spent time with the people who live and work there, the media’s relentlessly recycled picture of North Koreans as brainwashed automatons, robotically enslaved to the despotic Kims, is simplistic, dehumanising and cruel.

I went to North Korea twice in 2012: the only westerner granted total access to the country’s powerful propaganda film industry. Despite being closely monitored by five North Koreans on my crew, I can dispel some crazier rumours doing the rounds.

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Men are not forced to cut their hair like Kim Jong-un. Women can wear pants. It is safe to be a tourist, if you don’t hand out bibles. It is forbidden to film portraits of the Kims soft-focus or cropped. People like to dance in public, not just when told to by the state. The country is poor, but not everyone is starving or in chains: an estimated 100,000 North Koreans are imprisoned, with a further 8.3m lacking adequate food and shelter. The remaining 16.6m rely on a growing black market economy and lead “normal” enough lives to go to the movies.

Vice’s popular claim that North Korea no longer makes films is false: Pyongyang’s five studios produce 20 to 30 rom-coms, thrillers, dramas, animations and documentaries a year. The film stars, directors and writers I met had never heard of Stanley Kubrick, but loved Bend it Like Beckham, The Sound of Music and Avatar. Like their southern cousins, they were resilient, warm and loved telling jokes, mostly about the Russians and Chinese. Resentment towards Kim Jong-un was evident but concealed: criticising him can lead to the gulags.

My book about my experience featured Kim Jong-il on the cover – until my Pyongyang contact told me to remove him if I wanted my North Korean friends to survive. The Kims are considered too holy to physically depict on screen. A North Korean actor once had plastic surgery to portray founding founder Kim Il-sung in the drama, Star of Korea, then was permanently reassigned to a behind-the-scenes production role. Reports now assert the actor was sent to the gulags. With North Korea, the adage applies: never let the truth get in the way of a good story.